


Voyager Vignettes

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Boats and Ships, Clones, Community: JetC, Community: trek100, Crushes, Drabble, Drabble Collection, Episode s03e25 Worst Case Scenario, Episode s04e24 Demon, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Episode: s03e15 Coda, Episode: s05e10 Counterpoint, F/M, Falling In Love, Kissing, Name-Calling, Sailing, Sexual Content, Storms, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-30
Updated: 2010-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 20:29:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 6,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles, short pieces and silliness written between 1995-2003.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Designated

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Rocky.

The first time Chakotay calls her "Kathryn," the word works through her body like nanoprobes, making her feel truly human -- like a woman. When he hears himself, he grows frightened, but she smiles.

He does it again, by her request, though never comfortably, and eventually she understands. Not only does the name remind him that she can never be what he wants; it makes her understand that he is not what she wants, either, though this is the closest either expects to come.

She is braver than Chakotay. In the end she decides to tell Admiral Janeway how she feels.


	2. Perfect

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Trek100 paragon challenge.

Seven of Nine knows that she will never be the perfect Starfleet officer, nor the perfect human being. Nothing that she does is ever good enough for Captain Janeway, and if she cannot impress her captain, what hope will she have once Voyager returns to Earth?

So she cannot fathom Lieutenant Torres' resentment. Torres is half-Klingon; intelligence and tempestuousness suit her. When Seven corrects her calculations to the nearest hundred-thousandth and Torres snaps, "Thank you for being perfect," Seven does not understand her anger.

Torres keeps the ship running. And Janeway calls her "B'Elanna." Surely this must be accomplishment enough.


	3. Squall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first Trek100 challenge: Water. And the hell if I didn't write "Resolutions" fic for the first time in half a decade.

The storm was unlike any Chakotay had witnessed before, with violent wind and lightning but no rain. Kathryn's reaction, too, was unfamiliar; she cringed, cried out, but there were no tears as her equipment crashed around them, and she refused comfort.

The next day they cleaned until both were soaked with sweat. Chakotay washed down the sides of their shelter and watched Kathryn stab at the soil with a shovel, finding the rich mud underneath. He didn't mean to make her cry with his impromptu legend, but as tears streaked her face, he knew that something new could grow there.


	4. Weak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Trek100 challenge: love slaves. I blame Rocky for this one too.

Seska. Riley. Kellin. "I haven't forgotten, Chakotay," Kathryn muttered.

He was not strong. B'Elanna had tried obliquely to warn her, one night when they worked late together. Kathryn chose to interpret her counsel as envy, suspecting that a young Maquis engineer might have had a crush on her onetime captain.

She teased herself with someday.

The first time she saw Seven of Nine in human form, the long blonde hair and voluptuous breasts, she saw the future. It took longer than she expected, more than three years, but it happened.

His desires had bound her fate along with his own.


	5. Demonic Possession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since when do mimetic substances inherit the memories of the DNA they copy?

She is always with me now.

She cannot take a breath without my feeling her lungs expand. She cannot lift her face to the sky without my feeling the warmth. I know now that my link with Riley and her collective was meant to prepare me for this, this sharing of self with her and with the rest. And my hundreds of childhood lessons about how we are a part of the land and the land is a part of us finally make sense.

Harry and Tom said it was exhilarating, but that word doesn't begin to describe the incredible wonder of life in this place. I walk through the heart of live volcanoes unscarred. I stand at the center of erupting geysers and feel only the tumult, then the glorious surge of freedom. There is no hunger, no exhaustion, no compulsion to keep moving. The other times I have been happy in my life, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, climbing the mountains of Dorvan, watching the sun set on New Earth, were only shadows. We are all home. We are all together.

Annika comes to stand by my side. Ironic that she had to be assimilated by this world to become fully human. The Borg nanoprobes in her body have been fully neutralized by the fluid in our veins, part our blood and part the silver blood of the planet. Hours after our arrival, she announced that she no longer wished to be called Seven of Nine, because now she is one of one-hundred-and-forty-six. She was the first of us to shed her clothing, declaring the uniforms irrelevant. I believe that she misses the Doctor, but otherwise she has experienced the same joy which the rest of us share.

"Tuvok is conflicted," she tells me. She does not have to say the words: I already know, both his feelings and her concerns about them. The silver blood bond allows us to hide nothing. Tuvok has had a hard time accepting the logic of our situation. Even though I know he feels pleasure, even though I have shared his experience of wonder at our transformation, he suffers from a nagging need for a sense of purpose, a direction. Not even Kathryn can distract him from that.

Of any of us, Kathryn has changed the most. At the moment Voyager lifted off, she turned to me and said, "I'm not the captain anymore." I had always expected that she'd suffer from such a loss of identity, but she astonished me - she started pirouetting across the terrain, dancing part of that piece from Swan Lake she did for Talent Night, stopping only when she fell into one of the deuterium pools. When I rushed to her, alarmed, she came up laughing and pulled me in. "Nothing can hurt us anymore, Chakotay," she added, and I felt it through my body, coming from her and from the planet, the absolute conviction.

The first time we made love, with the silver blood in our veins and all around us shuddering its approval, I could feel the entire crew on the fringes of our connection. I wondered that I didn't resent that, yet it was how we should always have been - Kathryn and I have always been sworn to the crew, but so foolish as to think of them as an impediment rather than a supplement to our passion. Once it had had a taste of physical gratification, the silver blood became ravenous to experience it again, and we found ourselves connected sexually in ways we'd never tried nor even imagined previously - there was no sensation the new consciousness did not want to experience, no form of pleasure it did not crave. She accepted that, as she finally accepted me, she let herself experience flights which she would not even consider on the bridge or in Da Vinci's studio.

It took B'Elanna a little longer because she was jealous of Tom and Harry. The two shared a special bond between themselves because they were the first two - what happened between them on the planet when they were first taken was unlike anything the rest of us experienced once the silver blood knew sentience. But the planet put her in touch with her primal fire, the Klingon heat she had always tried to push aside, and she finally accepted that playing at monogamy with Tom had only made them both unhappy - neither of them accepts limits easily. Now they share their pleasure freely among the crew, and themselves, and we all feel their joy.

If anyone had told me that I would feel vicarious pleasure as Kathryn splashed in a pool of deuterium with B'Elanna and Vorick, if anyone had told me that I would share her cries of release as Tuvok moved over her body, if anyone had ever told me that Neelix has more erogenous zones on the back of his neck than some species have in their entire bodies and that I would revel in that knowledge, I would probably have been sick. But everything is changed here. We are one body, one spirit, we have evolved into something new. There are no sunrises, no seasons, no distractions or interruptions in our perfect communion. This is paradise, this demon-planet, and no matter where my double may travel among the stars, no matter what new experiences he may encounter, even if he reaches home, I do not envy him.

This is all I am.


	6. Next To Worst Case Scenario

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by "Worst Case Scenario" and its apparent sense of humor about fanfic.

Chakotay raised his phaser.

Dressed in Maquis garb, he cut a striking figure against the bright blue of the warp core. "It's over, Kathryn," he said quietly. "Don't make this any more difficult than it already is. I just want to do what's best for the entire crew..."

Kathryn Janeway never wavered the nose of the phaser rifle she aimed at her first officer's chest. "You're right. This has gone far enough." For several seconds they stood in stalemate, weapons aimed at one another's chests. Then Janeway smiled slyly. "Well, we could stand here all day while Seska steals the ship out from under us, but I don't think that's a good idea, do you? Or...we could join forces. Come on, Chakotay. Put down that phaser, and I'll make it worth your while."

"What could you possibly have to offer...?"

Without releasing her grip on the rifle's trigger, Janeway reached behind her and began taking down the bun that constrained her long hair. "Chakotay, I think we both know what you really want..."

"What in hell is this?" Tom Paris demanded from the back of the room. B'Elanna almost jumped out of her skin.

"Computer, end program!" She backed toward the arch defensively. "It's, uh, just some leftover programming..."

"Leftover programming? Of the captain trying to seduce Chakotay?" Tom's grin was wide. "Looks like something I'd have come up with, but I've never written anything like this. Who wrote it, anyway?"

"I don't know." B'Elanna's tone was defiant. "I was just getting ready to delete it."

"Well, let's figure it out, first." Waggling his eyebrows, Tom wandered toward the center of the room. "There was something familiar about that..."

"It's a variant on Insurrection Alpha," B'Elanna agreed.

Paris whirled on her. "Are you crazy? I thought that whole thing was purged from the data banks! Do you know what the captain would do if she knew you'd restored it?"

"I didn't restore it. These are someone else's variations--not Tuvok's, and not Seska's. The basic programming was wiped, but apparently someone saved this reconstruction under an encrypted authorization code. I was running it to try to figure out who it might have been. Any guesses?"

Tom's grin returned. "One way to find out. Computer, resume program." Janeway and Chakotay winked back into existence in front of him. Chakotay's jaw was still locked in determination, but the arm holding his phaser was wavering. Janeway finished uncoiling her hair, put down her own rifle, stepped towards the Maquis leader, and held out her hand.

"Give me the phaser, Chakotay. It's not my ship you're really after." She put one of her hands on his chest and disarmed him with the other, while he stared at her like a targ under infrared sensors. "Seska's just using you, letting you take all the risks so she can make a play for Voyager. I can offer you so much more..."

"This is a cinch, B'Elanna. Chakotay must have written this," Tom snorted. "Sheesh, I knew he had it bad for Janeway, but this is kind of pathetic, you know? Not to mention that under the Barclay Regulations, she could probably courtmartial him for fooling around with her image..."

B'Elanna had a slight frown between her eyebrows as she studied the images of their senior officers. "I don't think so. It would be pretty unlike Chakotay--he's not interested in holograms, I just can't imagine him using one for sex. And I definitely can't imagine him using one of someone he knows, or cares about..." her voice trailed off thoughtfully as she looked at Janeway, who was tearing open the front of her uniform with one hand and Chakotay's vest with the other.

"Besides, if Chakotay had written this, he would have made it interactive," the engineer said decisively. "If he can't do it, I don't think he could stand to watch. Could you?"

"Yeah," said Tom fuzzily, staring as Janeway started to shrug out of her tank top. "Uh--freeze program!" He turned to meet B'Elanna's raised eyebrow. "Well, if not Chakotay, then who?"

"Tuvok?" Paris burst out laughing, but Torres pressed on. "This is probably his idea of a worst case scenario. Can you imagine what he'd think if the two of them actually..."

"Yeah, but you don't think it would occur to Tuvok that it might really HAPPEN, do you? I don't think anyone on this ship honestly thinks Janeway would loosen up enough to, um..." He glanced back at the hologram, who had frozen in the middle of undressing with a sly, warm smile on her face, one arm inside her shirt at a suggestive angle. "God, she looks good like that," Tom muttered, half to himself. "Ummm...OK. No. Not Tuvok. Even if Tuvok thought this might happen, he could never have envisioned her like that. Not unless he's only pretending to be a Vulcan, not these details. It has to be someone else."

"Well, who would get off to the image of Janeway and Chakotay having sex?" Torres demanded, then flushed faintly. "Hmm. OK. Maybe the question should be, who has the skill to actually write a program like this, and save it so well-encrypted that I couldn't pick my way around the lockout?"

"Our Morale Officer might have the motive, and the technical know-how at this point. But he worships Janeway," Tom said thoughtfully. "You think Neelix would try to envision her fooling around?"

"Or the Doc? He's obsessed with studying human relationships, and he's probably just prurient enough to do something like this, Plus, he has holodeck access, and he was very interested in helping you rewrite Insurrection Alpha. And, he probably has greater knowledge of holographic technology than anyone on the ship."

"Other than you, you mean." Tom was looking at B'Elanna slyly. "And to think, I once thought you had a crush on Chakotay. Tell the truth. You wrote this. You have the expertise, and you know both parties involved well enough to be interested. And I think a woman came up with this. He's being way too passive. This is a female empowerment thing..."

Torres snarled menacingly, advancing on him. "You think women like having to resort to using their bodies to have power? You think we enjoy being told that our wits are nothing compared to our sex? This is a male fantasy, pure and simple--you know, Tom, it almost reminds me of that babe you used to keep at Sandrine's..."

"Whoa! Don't look at me!"

"No? Well, let's be logical about this." The chief engineer was grinning. "It must have been written by someone who had access to the original Insurrection Alpha program. You and Tuvok accessed the programming parameters directly--Harry tried to hack in from the bridge, but he never made it, and even if he had, I don't think he would have written something like this--he thinks of Janeway and Chakotay like his parents. Chakotay could have used a command-level override to access the program, but I still can't see this being his handiwork--even if he'd do something like this, my bet is he'd want her eating out of HIS hand, not the other way around. So if they didn't do it, and we know Seska didn't do it...who does that leave? The self-styled most talented holoprogrammer on this ship. You, Tom Paris."

"I didn't do it, though. Really." Tom looked almost regretful. "Maybe we should just delete it. If the wrong person found it, it might cause trouble."

"Think we should at least tell Chakotay first?" B'Elanna paused to look at his holoimage, which was staring at the captain frozen in the middle of undressing, his eyes wide and lips parted.

"Nah. We'd just embarrass him."

"Yeah, then I guess we should probably delete this. I'll have to put it in a report, but I'm betting that once the captain finds out what was in this file, she won't be sorry it's gone. I'll get to work on the override to make sure it's taken out." Torres knelt by the holodeck controls, while Paris looked thoughtfully at the two holograms.

"B'Elanna...tell me again how you stopped Seska's programming from killing me and Tuvok?"

"We rewrote the program." The engineer sounded pleased with herself. "We figured that if you could manipulate the parameters from inside the program, we could do the same thing from outside. We wrote right over Seska's programming."

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who's 'we'? Who actually wrote over it?"

"Well, I set up the matrix so we could access the program, and Harry ran the controls through the bridge relays since the comm system was down. But as for the actual writing, that was..."

"Janeway," they both said together. Then they both sat back abruptly.

Paris looked at the image of his captain seducing her renegade first officer. "You don't think..."

"The idea of rewriting Insurrection Alpha was to stop the scenario from playing itself out the way Seska wanted," Torres said slowly. "I was busy trying to implement the programming, I didn't stop to see what she was doing with it. I know that at one point, she was trying to turn Chakotay against Seska, or come up with some way to stop the mutiny at the source. But do you think she'd..."

Tom began to laugh, quietly, but it built into full hilarity within a minute. "Who else would have saved it, B'Elanna? Who else could have saved it without anyone finding out? Resume program," he spluttered.

"Wait," holographic Chakotay blurted as Janeway started to remove her shirt. "You don't have to do this, Kathryn."

"Oh, but I want to do this. Then we can stop what Seska's planning, and you and I need to have a talk about the need for purpose and focus for this crew, which is why we need Federation principles..."

B'Elanna looked at Tom. "Janeway," they said simultaneously, again. The images of the captain and first officer had halted inches from each other, exchanging smoldering looks; Chakotay had one arm half-raised as if to help her take her clothes off. Tom shook his head regretfully as B'Elanna turned quickly back to the panel and entered several codes.

"Computer, delete program, engineering override Torres Omega One." Janeway and Chakotay winked out of existence.

"Should we tell her?" Tom asked after a moment.

"She'll figure out what happened if she comes looking for it. I doubt she will. Probably it got saved accidentally, as part of a record of the purge..." B'Elanna grinned suddenly. "Let's tell Chakotay, instead. Not whose program we think it was, just that we found it and deleted it before it could cause trouble. Then he'll have to make a report to her..."

Paris began to laugh again. "Great idea. Let's go write it up now, in as much detail as possible. Especially that she wasn't wearing a bra..." B'Elanna swatted at him. "Want to do this over dinner?" he continued casually.

"Oh, sure." She shook her head. "Tom, I never thought I'd see you playing matchmaker for Chakotay."

"Well, maybe I'm returning a favor. He's the one who sets up our duty schedules, you know. Yours and mine." He raised an eyebrow at her. "DID you have a crush on him?"

"I'll never tell." She marched ahead of him out of the holodeck, then whirled back. "You know, it was kind of interesting the first time I ran Insurrection Alpha. When he asked me what I'd do to prove my loyalty--" she waggled an eyebrow at Paris, who stomped after her, making a face-- "I shot Harry," she concluded with a grin. "I wonder if I would have shot you, Tom?"


	7. Endless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Coda" coda I never wrote because of "Unity."

The wind rises when they step into the boat, smelling of salt and earthy perfume. It causes the sail to billow like a sheet being thrown hastily onto a bed. The champagne flutes clinking between her fingers, she puts out an arm to steady herself but goes sprawling to the deck, her hair pulling free from the ponytail as she falls. Somehow she saves the crystal. He thinks he has never heard music like her laughter.

When he follows her aboard, the little ship tips with his weight, rolling her toward his feet. She takes his hand long enough for him to help her stand, then gives him the glasses to go with the bottle he carries in an old wooden ice bucket. Then she unwinds the rest of her hair, tossing the pins over the side into the lake. This is her element, not the vast openness of space nor the solid ground where she occasionally plants her feet. With the moon illuminating the submerged gold in her hair, in the soft blue dress he had never thought to see again, she looks like a naiad unaccustomed to moving outside the water.

My chest still hurts, she says, fluttering a hand to the spot beneath her breastbone where he pounded life back into her hours before. Instinctively he reaches out a hand to cover and clasp hers. The gesture offers an intimacy very different from the forced closeness from earlier, but she does not resist it, lifting his fingers to press above her heart. He can feel the soft rise of her breast against his wrist as she breathes, yet cannot tell whose pulse sings silently of life. She lets his hand fall before his other arm can tire of holding the bucket and the flutes, turning away once more towards the lake.

He sets them adrift, navigating into the open waters where the moon spills a river of light across their path. The sky is brilliant with familiar stars; he picks one, starts to make a familiar wish. Tonight he thinks he will not even mind if it does not come true. His own chest hurts, his heart swelled to bursting with the terror and relief of the day. It had been like a nightmare version of his own desires, her acid-bitter mouth open to him, his hands moving on her unresponsive body. He will have to be more careful how he words his wishes.

Where's the champagne? she asks, coming towards him from her seat in the prow, where the sail partially obscures her. He has her hold the flutes while he pours. The toast she offers is to new beginnings. A lock of her long loose hair blows across her face into her glass when she drinks. He moves to brush it out of the way, leaving a trail of champagne across her cheek. Irresistible. His finger catches the liquid, and he puts it in his mouth. Then he collects and sucks on the damp hair. By the time he releases her, she has taken back his glass to stop him from dropping it.

She and the champagne are both delicious, and he is instantly drunk, taking her shoulders in both of his hands to stare through intoxicated eyes at her radiance. He waits for her to take another sip before kissing her, thinking that he will taste the sweetness on her lips, but the sweetness of her lips makes him forget the alcohol. It is almost too much, after almost losing her. I love you, he says, because he must, as the wind blows her hair into his eyes and sends champagne splashing over them both. Then, in a sonorous voice, he orders the waters to be calm.

Nearly dying in his arms seems to have relaxed her. She laughs again, and licks his chin, and starts to take off her wet dress. He moves to help her, but cannot help kissing her once he holds her again, and they slide to the deck in a puddle of champagne and fabric. Her dress becomes a blanket and his shirt a pillow as their hands and the breeze study the contours of one another's bodies, naming and mapping the strange new worlds. In the light of the moon, in the swell of the tide, this becomes the only possible reality, the one true coda to the music of her laughter.


	8. Technobabble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this in 1995 and it's as silly today as it was then. Dedicated to Siubhan who started the Synonym Contest. To quote Catie Clark: "The court finds this writer to be a hopeless fan with no life. Sit down and shut up."

Her eyes lit up like sensor feedback in an anomaly as he walked into her ready room. He scanned her from maximum range. Even from there, he could detect unusual energy output. His personal tricorder was giving him interesting flickers of information about the pointed condition of her port and starboard nacelles. He moved in cautiously like a shuttle attempting to land on an asteroid. The atmosphere sparked and crackled around them as he entered her gravity well.

"Take the conn," she whispered, moving her hand down his data padd until it pressed against his communicator, which chirped in response. Their probes inspected one another as he opened her communications array with his searching hail. He quickly pulled the protective covering off her control panels, and she gasped as he delicately examined the fine latticework of her bridge with his primary sensors.

She uncoupled his matrix to force down his shields, then barked an order to transport them across the space of her ready room before gravity dragged them downward to the hard deck. Easing gently around her subspace rift, he let his phase inducers examine the state of her coolant leak. Her engines were well-lubricated and showed no signs of nanite contamination, so he brought his plasma injector online. She heaved and groaned like a ship close to the galactic barrier as he breached her hull.

Her singularity rocked him dangerously, and he tried to drop from warp to impulse, fearing that his thrusters would fire too soon. Already his matter containment field showed signs of leakage, and he shook as if a displacement wave throttled his vessel's integrity. Her wormhole felt as though it were collapsing and the powerful sensation threw him into full reverse, but she gripped his aft engines and pulled him back toward her event horizon. Drawing more power from the backup systems, he drove firmly into her primary sensor array, waiting for her nacelles to lift.

The intensity of his coherent tetryon beam made her want to vent her plasma conduits even before she could reinitialize the dampening field. Unable to fight the laws of friction and momentum, she shrieked like a phaser on overload as her warp core exploded. Firing photons, he finally unleashed his particle stream into her pulsating generator.

Their tachyon emissions ceased for the moment, they drifted on impulse. Then she booted his secondary systems to begin again.


	9. Captains Courageous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Dead Janeway stories in JetC17, the holodeck stories on Voyager1001, Kate Mulgrew's request for Janeway's coffin, the general misery of this season...I can't take it anymore! This story is for Sr. Mary Kathryn.

As the last members of Gamma Shift left the bridge, Chakotay surveyed his domain. The crew was still stunned by the devastating engineering accident that had taken the life of Kathryn Janeway and would have killed them all, had Naomi Wildman not cleverly reprogrammed Flotter to borrow Captain Proton's equipment and seal off Deck Six. Now the holodecks were ruined and the Doctor looked like a cross between Trevis and Lord Burleigh, but at least Kathryn wasn't around to complain.

Kathryn. Chakotay sighed deeply. It had taken all his effort these past few months to convince her that he was still her devoted lap-dog...and that he couldn't stand Seven and her Borg implants. The truth of the matter was that from the moment he laid eyes on them, he could think of little else. Not even his fling with Kellin - which he'd miraculously managed to convince the rest of the crew that he'd forgotten about just as they were pretending they had - could distract him for long. He hadn't precisely wished Janeway dead, but he'd realized during his many alternate-universe experiences as captain that if she ever got fed up and decided to bail off the ship to have babies with some politician in some remote suburb of the galaxy, he'd be perfectly comfortable in her chair. Especially with "Six of Nine" at his side. He knew all about the human traditions she and Harry had been practicing in astrometrics after hours, and he could tell the beautiful Borg was bored with the boy. She was ready for a man.

"Chakotay to Annika," he murmured into his comm badge - Seven had requested that they stop calling her by that designation because it reminded her too much of Janeway, on whom the cybernetic creature had apparently had an even worse crush than they had suspected...lately all she wanted to do was mope around and play Velocity against a holographic recreation of the captain. "Please come to the bridge for an emergency tune-up." The former First Officer didn't mention that the tune-up would be to his systems, not the ship's, but surely Seven would understand the importance of keeping the senior officer in peak shape, so to speak...and if she didn't, well, Chakotay would just have to have Doctor Burleigh reprogrammed to explain things to her.

It was really too bad about Janeway, he reflected as he waited for his date...errr, technician. He hadn't meant to cause the overload which leaked radiation into the Jeffries tube where she had courageously crawled, muttering that if he hadn't trashed so many of their shuttles, they could use spare parts from one of them to fix the problem. He certainly hadn't meant to seal her in there--well, not really, he'd only been trying to aid the little Wildman brat's plan to seal off the contaminated parts of the ship, he'd forgotten all about Janeway because he was distracted by Paris and Torres' flirting.

Of course Tuvok was no help whatsoever--he couldn't stop a security breach in his own ass. Chakotay snorted at the image, making a mental note that he would have to ditch Tuvok before his next pon farr; no way was the Big C sharing his ship with a rabid Vulcan. Well, it had been a tragedy, but no one had cried much at the funeral, and everyone seemed very happy when their new fearless leader announced that there was no reason to keep the silly military structure off-duty on the vessel, and that everyone was wasting too much time trying to get home instead of enjoying what they had.

"It's good to be the captain," Chakotay remarked to no one in particular, hearing the turbolift doors swish open. He fingered the fourth pip which he had swiped from Janeway's collar right before sealing her coffin, swiveling in her former chair to smile at her protegee.


	10. Counterbalance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> August put out a challenge to write a story in which our favorite twosome kiss, just once. Since I had just seen the "Counterpoint" preview, this quick silly response popped into my head; it probably contains inconsistencies with the actual episode, but what the hell.
> 
>  
> 
> It's the way you love me,  
> It's a feeling like this,  
> It's centrifugal motion,  
> It's perpetual bliss,  
> It's that pivotal moment,  
> It's unthinkable--  
> This kiss, this kiss--  
> Unsinkable...
> 
> \--Faith Hill

Chakotay glanced at the captain as he exited the turbolift, watching her cross to her chair, wiping her mouth. There was an odd sway to her hips and she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands. The first officer was startled: he knew the events of recent days had taken their toll, but this uncertainty seemed very unlike her. When Kathryn Janeway looked up to meet his eyes, what he saw in her own made his breath catch. She was wearing something akin to the infamous "death glare," but with a smoldering fire behind it which he didn't think he'd ever seen before. In fact, she appeared to be burning with the sort of heat she usually reserved for impassioned speeches about the importance of the Prime Directive.

"May I see you for a moment?" she asked without preamble, inclining her head toward her ready room. Without waiting for her first officer to answer, she strode across to her door, barely glancing at Tuvok as she turned the bridge over to him. Chakotay tried to ignore his unpredictable pulse rate and the surprised glances from the crew as he followed the captain.

When he entered, she was pacing by the viewport, with one hand on her hip and the other fidgeting near her mouth again. "Everything all right, Captain?" he asked neutrally.

"Oh yes. This mission was quite a success, wasn't it? Refugees safe, aliens away, ship intact. Makes the command crew look great." He wasn't sure of the referent for the irony in her voice. "Chakotay, can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"Do you think being out here has changed me? Do I seem to be the same person I was when we met four and a half years ago?"

He blinked, conjuring an image of the woman he'd met on that bridge--it seemed much longer than a few years ago--so that for a moment, he forgot the danger of letting his mind travel back in time, to the face of the captain he'd loved for so long. Taking a breath, he concentrated on the version before him now. She'd never loved him, she'd cut her hair, she'd even stopped listening to his recommendations, there was no point in remembering being in this very room discussing whether the crew would pair off and have children together, or how she couldn't imagine a day without him.

Kathryn's eyes narrowed as she watched his face; he wondered how much he'd just revealed in that unguarded moment. "Yes, I think you've changed," he said quietly. "We all have. We've gotten a little tougher and maybe a little more reckless. But I don't think your fundamental values have changed..."

Chakotay stopped at her laugh--it wasn't a happy one. "Reckless," she repeated, hands on both hips, but she wasn't criticizing him...she was looking down at her feet, digging one toe into the floor. "Chakotay, would you try an experiment with me? I should warn you that I have no idea what the outcome might be. It might..." Kathryn looked up at him with a strange light in her eyes. "It might be dangerous," she admitted.

Stop! Chakotay tried to tell himself. He thought of the number of times he'd been burned trying her experiments...but already he knew it was hopeless. The image of Kathryn as he remembered her--the one he'd thought he'd banished--was still with him, merging in and out of the captain who stood before him now with a very unusual expression on her face. It wasn't that he'd never seen such a look before; it was that he'd never expected to see it again, that tilt to her chin, that slight purse of her lips.

There was a time when she had known exactly what it did to him to see her like this. Maybe she still knew. "All right, Kathryn," he agreed.

Lowering her head with an expression of characteristic determination, she took several steps across the room to where he was standing, reached up and pulled his head down. Before he quite knew what was going on, her fingernails were digging into the back of his neck as she lifted her lips to his.

Even though it was fairly chaste, even though she made no effort to open his mouth or taste him with her tongue, even though their hands were locked in place on one another's heads and backs rather than wandering, even though she wasn't quite at the right angle to feel his sudden erection fighting the strictures of his uniform, even though the press of her lips on his lasted perhaps ten seconds--even though she'd called it an experiment, even though it wasn't the way he dreamed it in any of the dozens of fantasies he'd had about this moment--it was the most memorable kiss of his life. The intensity, the momentary frantic pressure from her, the crush of her teeth behind her lips, and then the dazed shock in her eyes when she tore away...he didn't move, he stood centimeters from her, staring, wishing he could close his mouth. Their arms hovered in midair, not quite reaching for one another but not returning to their customary places at their sides, either. Kathryn lowered her eyes as if she would apologize, then looked back up defiantly, her expression changing from fear to surprise to a flash of that unbelievable heat again.

"What...?" he managed to ask.

"I needed..." The captain's voice came out low and sultry. She stepped back in earnest, pushing her hair back into place from where his hands had dragged it forward as she disengaged. Clearing her throat, she tried again: "I needed to know whether it was...just being out here so long." She met his eyes again, but when she looked away, remorse and guilt rather than desire dominated her features. "That... Kashyk, he...um, we..."

Interrupting, Chakotay realized, "You kissed him." He waited for the sinking feeling which should have followed, but it didn't come. His mouth was still tingling from Kathryn Janeway's lips. His primary emotion towards the duplicitous alien was gratitude.

"He kissed me. It wasn't _my_ idea...all right, I kissed him," Kathryn conceded. "And I don't even _like_ him, Chakotay." He must have started to grin in spite of himself, because her mouth curled petulantly. "He's despicable. Any attraction I felt for him was just a case of life imitating art. It's been so long. He was just...there."

"But you wanted to make sure it was just that." She glanced away. "Did you?"

The smile she gave him knocked the air out of his chest. "Oh, yes."

Chakotay wondered whether he should feel outraged, taken advantage of, violated--it wasn't like he could have gone to her, after Riley Frasier, and asked the same thing. But all he felt was giddy joy. Of course, it wouldn't last--give her an hour and she'd be Captain Janeway again, able to go another five years before she kissed anyone. He already knew better than to think he could go so long. Still, she'd just proven that over time, anything was possible...anything.

"Well, I'm glad I could be of service, Captain. Let me know if there's any other way I can...better serve under you."

Kathryn was entirely unsuccessful in snorting back her laugh as she attempted to put her command persona back in place. "Thank you, Commander. Perhaps you'd better go relieve Tuvok on the bridge. We don't want to start gossip, you know."

"I know. Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you kissed Kashyk. You can always buy my silence this way." Chakotay flashed her another buoyant grin as he turned back towards the bridge, where she'd sit beside him in a few minutes, trying to ignore him when he winked.


End file.
